Getting Real About Race: Part 2
It’s About Power
“We must find a way to subvert its dominating power—race as racism—to one that can empower us—race as antiracism.”
Fundamentally race is about power. It is an invention that gives some people power over others. So, even though, at base, it is merely a set of lies, race moves mountains in our world and structures our lives.
As a teacher, I see how tricky it can be to accept that lies can be so powerful. I have students every year who can’t believe that something so fictitious can be so real. But ideas are powerful. In fact, they are everything to us, shaping all that we know about ourselves and our world.
As humans, we learn everything about our world via language, representations, descriptions, and words. When we are born, we know nothing about our world until we begin acquiring language from our caregivers. From there, we form our own systems of thought and belief.
Race is a part of the constellation of ideas that inform who we become and what we come to hold as true. It is a filter for our seeing and believing.
It’s About Empowerment
Race is really with us now, and as of now, there is no end in sight. The best we can do is think critically about it and decide with open eyes how we want to use what we know about it to see and relate to one another differently. We must find a way to subvert its dominating power—race as racism—to one that can empower us—race as antiracism.
One way that we can fight against the dominating form of race is to change racial stereotypes. Many social movements from Civil Rights to #BLM have done this by taking back the language of race and reissuing it with positive, life-giving meaning. Making the very language of race mean something empowering is an important first step in forging antiracism in our world.
Another way that we can fight against the dominating form of race is to call out racism wherever we see or experience it. All of our social institutions have stemmed from White Supremacism. That is just a fact in America. Very few social spaces are antiracist. Racial microaggressions and macroaggressions are happening just about everywhere. By tuning into this fact and using our voices to shed light on it as racism is happening, we stand a better chance of changing our circumstances and shifting the balance from power to empowerment.